I graduated from the University of Washington in 2008 with a degree in Business Administration (Marketing), and immediately entered the professional online marketing world. I founded AudienceBloom in April 2010, and have since become a columnist for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Huffington Post. My personal blog is located at AudienceBloom.com/blog. I guest lecture for marketing classes at the University of Washington, and currently reside in Seattle, WA.

Should I Work With My Penalized Domain Or Get A New One?

So, you’re in trouble with Google. Having your site penalized by Google not only feels terrible, it can have a catastrophic impact on your bottom line. Particularly when your website is the bread and butter of your business, your immediate urge may be to shut down your penalized domain and start fresh; after all, no one wants to continue to invest time and money into a site that may never fully recover.

It’s important to keep in mind, however, that while Google is tough on sites that attempt to game the system, they’re not out to get you. Google has become more transparent in recent years about letting webmasters know why they’ve been penalized, and the process of having the penalty removed is often fairly straightforward (though tedious and time-consuming). For this reason, ditching your penalized domain may be overkill – and definitely isn’t always the best answer.

If you’ve tried everything, including hiring professional help, and still can’t get the penalty removed, ditching your domain and getting a new one should be reserved as a last resort. In this article, I’ll cover some of the important factors you need to consider before ditching your penalized site in favor of a new domain.

Two Things to Consider Before You Ditch Your Domain

While switching to a new domain is sometimes the best option, it’s important that you understand the ramifications of starting over. Before you decide to completely ditch your site in favor of getting a new domain, make sure you understand how to do it properly, and what you could potentially be losing.

Consideration #1: The penalty may follow you, even if you don’t redirect the old domain to the new one.

According to Google’s John Mueller, it’s entirely possible for a penalty to follow you to a new domain, even without redirects. That’s right: If you move all of your content over to a completely new domain, Google may detect that this was simply a site move, and the penalty will be transferred to the new domain. It’s easy for Google to spot content that it has previously indexed; so if you don’t want the penalty to follow you, you’ll have to ditch more than just your domain – you’ll have to ditch all your content, too.

Even if Google misses the fact that you’ve simply moved your penalized site to another domain, the new site is likely to earn a new penalty unless you’ve fixed the underlying issues that caused the penalty in the first place.

This means if you want to start fresh, it’s critically important that you don’t simply migrate your penalized site over to a new domain. You’ll need to ensure you’ve fixed any content-related issues that could have contributed to the penalty, and make sure you’re carefully staying within the bounds of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as you build your new site.

Consideration #2: You risk losing your pre-penalty rankings (if your site was at one point in time ranking authentically).

If your site was built on high-quality content and authoritative inbound links, but then was penalized due to black-hat SEO practices, it may be worthwhile to keep the domain and do whatever you can to remove the penalty. If you can pinpoint one or two strategies or tactics that resulted in the penalty, it’s likely easier and more beneficial to simply fix the underlying issue and try to get the penalty removed.

In these cases, you stand to retain the rankings, link equity, brand equity, and other trust indicators associated with your domain prior to the penalty. Once you’ve fixed the underlying issues, your site’s rankings will likely improve; keep in mind, however, that any inflated rankings your site had due to bad links or other overly-aggressive SEO strategies won’t come back after the penalty is lifted.

Benefits of Getting a New Domain

I do believe there are situations in which getting a new domain is the answer; not the ‘easy’ route as some may believe, but a less risky alternative than trying to fix a site with significant, long-standing issues.

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